It’s an emerging economic narrative that we’ve been talking about for a while now: Upper-income consumers are going out and spending money, while lower-income consumers are pulling back. In other words, the K-shaped economy.

Turns out that divergence is showing up in corporate America, too. Profits are surging at the biggest companies — while profits at smaller companies are more sluggish.

When we’re talking about the biggest companies pulling in the most profits, we’re really talking about big tech companies.

“They’re benefiting from some themes and megatrends, such as AI and cloud computing. And they have very wide moats of power,” said Nathan Thooft with Manulife Investment Management.

He said those wide moats of power are filled with money, which they can use to fend off the competition.

“To innovate, and introduce new technologies at a very fast pace, relative to some of the rest of the market,” he said.

Thooft said smaller companies have been more reluctant to make those kinds of investments. Especially since economic policy has been so hard to predict this year.

“That policy uncertainty certainly impacted smaller companies more than large companies. And it just impacted how they made business decisions. It had them defer decisions,” he said. And that’s making it hard for smaller corporations to pull in profit.

Evan Rawley, a management professor at the University of Connecticut, said that can make it even harder for smaller companies to catch up.

“Capital flows toward the firms that make money. And so, unless they can find a way to fight back and create useful products that people and businesses want, they’re going to shrink, and they’ll become less and less important,” he said.

Rawley said that’s not necessarily a bad thing for the economy overall.

“In terms of economic growth, it’s good. I mean we’re having growth, and some people are winners, and some people are losers, but overall the cake is growing,” he said.

But the concern, he said, is that these tech giants are too dominant.

“In cloud computing, there’s basically three players. In operating systems, there’s basically two players. In search, there’s basically two or three players. So you have these oligopolies, and that gives them a lot of pricing power,” Rawley said, which raises costs for consumers and businesses.

Another concern is that an increasingly powerful tech sector could make the economy more vulnerable to a tech slowdown.

“Eventually, it’s going to reach an equilibrium, kind of like a balance point, where they’ll find their new growth pattern,” said John Bai, a finance professor at Northeastern University.

Which means the industry will have to adjust.

“When that happens, just the number of people … you can call it over-hired people at this point in time … will inevitably be let go,” he said.

The hope, Bai said, is that those tech-sector workers would eventually get scooped up by other industries.